On meltdowns

Someone asked me on Twitter the other day – an autistic person who doesn’t experience them – what it feels like to have a meltdown. It’s not a subject I especially like talking about – I’ve attempted to write about it several times on this blog, got frustrated, and given up.

This past week, I had one of the most distressing, disorientating, debilitating meltdowns I’ve had for quite some years. Three days after it happened, I’m still exhausted. But the immediacy and severity of this recent experience gave me the language to tweet a thread about how it feels (for me at least), and it appeared to be something others found useful, so I’m expanding that string of tweets here, so it may reach a wider audience.

Bear in mind here, every autistic person’s experience is different. The following words do, however, give an illustration of what a meltdown is…